Hi-Rez Studios announces significant changes for Tribes Ascend, based on feedback from closed beta testing of this upcoming continuation of the Tribes series of multiplayer first-person shooters. Word is they are shaking up their planned class structure, and will be adding more of the flexibility players have been requesting. Here's word on the next update to the game's ongoing closed beta test, which is available to those who preorder through the Tribes Ascend Website, along with some of those who have signed up for the beta:

The next update will include additional class customization and a much more polished user interface that really showcases the sci-fi, high resolution graphics of Tribes: Ascend. Hi-Rez will be collapsing the total number of playable classes from 12 to 9, but adding the ability for players to unlock new weapons for each class and further customize their loadout. Three of the nine classes will be available right away so a new player will have access to a Light, Medium, and Heavy class in his or her first match.

“We believe this system preserves class-based combat while also offering additional flexibility for players to customize classes around individual play style. It continues to provide a balanced and level playing field for all players.”

elefunk wrote on Feb 2, 2012, 20:01:Everything else is preferential play style, not actually necessary or advantageous to compete.

That is the theory behind TF2 and it's range of different classes too. But, in practice, at least to me, the varied weapon selection within the classes felt like it bestowed distinct advantages of flexibility to people who had them, which in my view unbalanced the matches enough to make me lose interest.

Tribes Ascend might feel different in practice, but I have my doubts.

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” - Mahatma Gandhi

You pay to gain XP faster, and have to continue to pay monthly if you want to keep gaining XP faster. That's enough to make it P2W.

Sounds like it to me as well, or at least "pay-to-win-faster". Even if it's only to allow "different-not-better" type gear, as is (arguably) the case with Team Fortress 2, I'd still argue that a larger number of "different" option allows a player to be that much more flexible in-game, which to me is an advantage in and of itself.

The game gives you a light, medium, and heavy class for free. That is all the flexibility you need in order to be able to compete.

Everything else is preferential play style, not actually necessary or advantageous to compete.

Krovven wrote on Feb 2, 2012, 19:42:And for all those saying this isn't Pay To Win.

If you can pay additional money to gain a benefit over players that do not pay the extra cash, it's P2W.

Tribes Ascend, can you pay an extra fee to gain XP and Tokens faster and purchase Gold to unlock more classes? Yes. It's P2W.

It depends entirely on whether the benefit unbalances the actual game (which you've never played of course).

There is no benefit in class unlocks without the player skill to drive it. Any player can use vehicles as long as they have the skill to accumulate the points required to buy one. Anyone can play any class they want to unlock. No one class is significantly 'better' than any other across the board.

If you get tokens faster (what you use to unlock classes), you wouldn't need to buy gold to unlock classes. You also get tokens a lot faster from good play, so a person can buy a boost and still not get as many tokens/xp as a freebie who is kicking ass. Kinda blows your theories out of the water...

To quote you from the Ryder White post thread...

Judging it on 100% speculation and a handful of comments from the most cynical gamers around, when the PC version has mostly favorable reviews, and you've already been told multiple times that the major problems were fixed in the first week of release, just reeks of idiocy.

And it fits perfectly. If you had the first clue about how the game actually worked and what you got for your money, and what you need to do to make the most of it, you might come off as anything other than pig ignorant.

You pay to gain XP faster, and have to continue to pay monthly if you want to keep gaining XP faster. That's enough to make it P2W.

Sounds like it to me as well, or at least "pay-to-win-faster". Even if it's only to allow "different-not-better" type gear, as is (arguably) the case with Team Fortress 2, I'd still argue that a larger number of "different" option allows a player to be that much more flexible in-game, which to me is an advantage in and of itself.

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” - Mahatma Gandhi

Gaining XP doesn't give you any advantages. It gives you variety. You can purchase every single class in the game, but none of it makes you better at the game, and none of it gives you any advantages.

Don't you get it? Every single free-to-play developer says that 90%+ of people never pay a single penny.-If you actually make the game "pay to win", none of the free players would stick around. -If none of the free players stick around, then you've lost 90% of your userbase. -If you lose 90% of your userbase, the people who were willing to pay money won't want to pay anything anymore.

Tribes Ascend is not pay to win, and it would be direct against Hi-Rez's interests to make it so.

Krovven wrote on Feb 2, 2012, 19:42:And for all those saying this isn't Pay To Win.

If you can pay additional money to gain a benefit over players that do not pay the extra cash, it's P2W.

Tribes Ascend, can you pay an extra fee to gain XP and Tokens faster and purchase Gold to unlock more classes? Yes. It's P2W.

So once again, you've never played Tribes Ascend, have you?

Nothing you can buy in Tribes Ascend is better than anything else. The stuff you buy is *DIFFERENT*, not *BETTER*.

Same holds true for perks in the game. You can't outright buy perks. You have to earn them by playing the game. You could spend every single penny you own on this game if you want, and you'd have 0 advantage over someone who paid nothing.

You can't read can you? You pay to gain XP faster, and have to continue to pay monthly if you want to keep gaining XP faster. That's enough to make it P2W.

You can also buy classes faster with the increased Tokens and my understanding is Gold is also used to purchase Classes. Plus, they have stated they intend to sell other "undisclosed" stuff in the future.

Krovven wrote on Feb 2, 2012, 19:42:And for all those saying this isn't Pay To Win.

If you can pay additional money to gain a benefit over players that do not pay the extra cash, it's P2W.

Tribes Ascend, can you pay an extra fee to gain XP and Tokens faster and purchase Gold to unlock more classes? Yes. It's P2W.

So once again, you've never played Tribes Ascend, have you?

Nothing you can buy in Tribes Ascend is better than anything else. The stuff you buy is *DIFFERENT*, not *BETTER*.

Same holds true for perks in the game. You can't outright buy perks. You have to earn them by playing the game. You could spend every single penny you own on this game if you want, and you'd have 0 advantage over someone who paid nothing.

Absolutely nothing about Tribes Ascend is "pay to win". For less than the cost of a full retail game you can unlock literally everything in the game right now, but of course, you don't actually need to.

Before paying a dime for the game, I played it for hours, fully enjoyed it, and never once felt like I was at a disadvantage, and never once felt like I was having a lesser experience. The only thing I was missing out on was variety. With this patch, there's even more balance and variety enabled for people who don't pay anything.

Why are you continuing to waste your time in this thread ranting about a game you've clearly not tried once and seem to have no interest in even learning anything about?

Jerykk wrote on Feb 2, 2012, 16:23:Not that I disagree with your original point or anything. I just find it humorous that you condemn microtransactions while admitting to paying for CoD.

Already stated I've never bought any CoD DLC/Map Pack and refuse to support $15 for a few maps, sometimes rehashed maps. It's another model I will not support. MW3 is certainly not P2W so there is no comparison. If they started charging $15 a month to get XP and in-game currency faster, then I'd agree with you. But out of the box MW3 is a feature and content filled game that always works.

It's so funny watching people accuse Tribes Ascend, and even Team Fortress 2, of being "pay to win".

I mean seriously, if you're going to complain about games you've never played, at least try to make your complaints believable!

Frags4Fun wrote on Feb 2, 2012, 19:13:I got my beta key a few months ago and never bothered to try it due to all the negative feedback that I was reading (mostly on Bluesnews). I installed the game last night and was pleasantly surprised. It's actually a lot of fun. Even with the basic loadout that you start with, I was in 1st place at the end of my first game. Anyone who played the old tribes games will have an advantage over the masses of noobs. It's fun! They still need to do a lot to get it to the quality of T1 & T2, but the game is well on it's way. I recommend that anyone who enjoyed tribes in the past should try this. The limited loadouts were my only concern last night and to read this list of changes makes it all the better. Quit bitching and give it a try. You have nothing to lose. Go to their Facebook page and get your key.

If you ever based your purchasing and playing decision based on Blue's News impressions, you'd never play anything! Quite the misguided idea, considering that the most cynical people here never even play the games they complain about.

I've been saying for months now that Tribes Ascend is the best thing I played at PAX, and I played it across many sessions for hours at PAX. Since getting into the beta, I happily played another 10-20 hours, and purchased the VIP pack with 0 reservations.

Hi-Rez has wholly delivered, and this patch is only one of many incredible displays of support and listening to the community. It's really incredible how many ideas they've implemented that were directly requested by people playing it, and how quickly they've fixed major issues.

I got my beta key a few months ago and never bothered to try it due to all the negative feedback that I was reading (mostly on Bluesnews). I installed the game last night and was pleasantly surprised. It's actually a lot of fun. Even with the basic loadout that you start with, I was in 1st place at the end of my first game. Anyone who played the old tribes games will have an advantage over the masses of noobs. It's fun! They still need to do a lot to get it to the quality of T1 & T2, but the game is well on it's way. I recommend that anyone who enjoyed tribes in the past should try this. The limited loadouts were my only concern last night and to read this list of changes makes it all the better. Quit bitching and give it a try. You have nothing to lose. Go to their Facebook page and get your key.

Krovven wrote on Feb 2, 2012, 15:41:He has already made multiple transactions, thus we can conclude he will continue to make more transactions so he can P2W.

Negative. I paid the initial $30, then I paid a additional $15 to level up my least favorite classes. I did it to support the Tribes franchise, because I want it to succeed. I'd rather support this game than a faggoty MW game. I don't plan on dumping any more money into it. For the entertainment value it has provided, $45 was nothing.

I have logged over 100 hours in TA so far, and again, it was worth every penny.

Esoteric wrote on Feb 2, 2012, 11:41:[AND they've been accepting money for gold and boosters which people have been using to gain this progress.

Are these the same people that bought into Hellgate Londons Lifetime Subscription?

Seriously though, I'm interested to try out the game, but more interested in Firefall. If $8 is all it takes, I may look into that. Still, the devs promising to carry over stuff to official launch of the game is dumb. Launch day should be a relatively even playing field.

You can get into beta for free. Go to their FB page and like them. My cousin got a key instantly last night.

Although to be completely fair, I score pretty high most of the time, unless I'm screwing around or trying to HO (horribly), so I have no idea how long it would take someone with no Tribes experience to unlock anything.

I was pretty critical of the game before I tried it. I'm still critical about the removal of the loadout system (although this patch, and unlockable weapons, looks to be working towards fixing that), and I don't like all the bullet weapons in the game. Bullet weapons don't feel Tribesy :\

I only played briefly when I first got into the Beta, but after a few patches (which tightened up the physics and converted the guns from hitscan to projectiles) I tried again and I'm still playing. It's a legitimately fun game, and some of its different design decisions have grown on me.

It feels like a Tribes game. Maybe "Tribes-lite", but it definitely feels hundreds of times more Tribesish than Tribes: Vengeance ever did. Hell, the physics feel better than Tribes 2 base, which was a proper Tribes game. And by 'better' I don't mean 'exactly like Tribes 1', because they didn't make the mistake of trying (and not succeeding) to exactly duplicate that game.

And holy crap, it's not Pay2Win (okay, wasn't; again, have to see this patch, but I don't expect they've significantly worsened it). I was expecting it to be, but it's not. You started with Soldier and Ranger, and they were both awesome versatile classes.

I only used 3 classes: Soldier (Medium), Pathfinder (Light), Doombringer (Heavy), and Juggernaut (Heavy) which I play as:

Pathfinder and Juggernaut are/were two of the cheapest unlockable classes. I think I got Pathfinder in my first day.

The unlockable classes essentially add extra versatility (here's a sniper class, here's a class that's good for HOFing, here's a class that's good for wrecking bases), not extra might. It doesn't take long to unlock if there's only a couple classes you care about. And I've nearly maxed Pathfinder and Soldier's trees, or at least got everything I care about. I never felt limited before doing so, though. You can collect 'em all if you care, but it's not mandatory.

Needs more and better maps, though. I don't see why they don't just let us have a map editor :\

Krovven wrote on Feb 2, 2012, 15:01:[Paying $45 for in-game currency and to level up faster in a Beta stands for just about everything wrong with gaming these days.

Some people like to support the developers of games they like, and have the means to do so. The alternative is a toxic community like Company of Heroes Online had where everyone would make fun of people that bought COHO cash, and as a consequence, the game generated too little revenue and was cancelled.

It's not Tribes, but it feels fairly familiar. I just miss the ability to change classes in a game. How many times I switched to Heavy to lay some artillery on the base to allow the team infiltrate the base while the other teams snipers are hiding. Then switching to scout to run in and grab the flag to get it closer to the door before I die and then switch again to a diffident class to assault the base now that the flag was near the door and then scout when it is out in the open to dash and get the flag for the 25 minute flag capture!

Eh? You can switch classes ingame! Just hit esc or I or P or...actually I don't know what you hit in the new patch, but you can switch classes, I do it all the time.

It's not Tribes, but it feels fairly familiar. I just miss the ability to change classes in a game. How many times I switched to Heavy to lay some artillery on the base to allow the team infiltrate the base while the other teams snipers are hiding. Then switching to scout to run in and grab the flag to get it closer to the door before I die and then switch again to a diffident class to assault the base now that the flag was near the door and then scout when it is out in the open to dash and get the flag for the 25 minute flag capture!